


Stirs in the Buried Life

by wickedthoughts



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Sex, Body Image, Castration, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Medical Procedures, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Past Violence, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-09-14 20:53:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9202805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wickedthoughts/pseuds/wickedthoughts
Summary: "Touch me, remind me who I am."





	

**Author's Note:**

> I should have been working on one of my many WIP's. But this came to me instead, oops.
> 
> The tags are deceptive. This is a story about the aftermath of horror, but it's also very soft and sweet.
> 
> Title/Summary from the poem _Touch Me_ by Stanley Kunitz.

* * *

It’s almost been a year, and Bucky still can’t get enough of the way Steve touches him. It makes his heart race and his skin shiver. Whether they’re in public and it’s a casual brush of Steve’s fingers on the skin of his right arm, (or on the metal of his left, which he can “feel” but not in the same way, and not in any way he’s able to satisfactorily explain to other people so he’s stopped trying), or they’re in bed together and Steve’s fingers are purposefully caressing the inside of Bucky’s naked thigh, it elicits the same response.

He hasn’t been touched like that- like a person, like he matters as a person- since his first life. The life where he had all the parts he was born with and all his memories felt like his own. The life where Steve didn’t touch him like this, and Bucky could only pretend that it was Steve in his bed and not the parade of poor, beautiful girls that Bucky felt nothing for, no matter how hard he tried.

_“I love you, Bucky,” Steve had told him, fumbling over the words, two days after the Winter Soldier had appeared on the Avenger’s doorstep with nowhere else to go after HYDRA’s defeat. “I’ve loved you since I was sixteen years old, maybe longer, and- and I thought I’d never get to tell you, but now I can and I’m not gonna wait too long this time- and- and, God, I **love** you. Do you- ? Could you- ?” _

_~~The Asset~~ Bucky had nothing to say to that, nothing he could say, but then Steve’s hand had brushed his face and the meaning of Steve’s words had fully registered with the part of him that was seventeen years old and silently, unrequitedly in love with his best friend, and he had nodded wildly. He’d tried to pretend he was still that boy, that they were both still those boys from that other life, as Steve’s lips had found his for the first time._

Bucky wants to say unequivocally that _this_ life is better. That despite what he’s lost and what he’s been forced to do in the past seventy years, having Steve like this, touching and being touched, is worth everything. He wants to say it, but it’s not true. He misses the way his body used to be, as much as he misses the way his mind was his alone. He selfishly wishes he could have had all of that _and_ Steve.

_“I don’t think that’s selfish,” Natasha told him, when he’d confessed his conflict to her. “But even if it is, you’re allowed to be selfish, James. It’s part of being human.”_

_Bucky hadn’t told her how he doesn’t really **feel** human anymore. He doesn’t like to talk about himself, or his feelings, and he’d bothered Natasha enough already._

_**Fuck, how can she look at him- sit even a few feet away from him- after the way he’d hit her, shot her, tried to kill her?** _

Only Steve gets to touch him these days. Anyone else’s touch makes him flinch. Makes him afraid, makes him _angry._ He understands that his new friends aren’t trying to hurt him, to control him, but understanding does nothing to mitigate his reactions. His friends have learned to give him space.

“Barnes’s five-foot bubble,” Sam sometimes calls it. “Make way, make way!”

Sam likes to tease Bucky, give him a hard time like friends do, even after he had tried to kill Sam, too. Bucky likes it, the way Sam gives him grief. It makes him remember what it was like to be a person, as much as when Natasha listens to him or when Steve touches him.

While Bucky can’t get enough of Steve’s touch, Steve can’t seem to get enough of telling Bucky that he loves him. Steve goes out of his way every day to say it.

“I love you.”

He’ll say when they wake up together in the morning.

“I love you.”

He’ll say before he goes jogging with Sam, and after he comes back drenched in sweat.

_“I love you.”_

Today, they’re in the kitchen making breakfast when Steve starts. “Hey, Buck, I- ”

“I know, I know, you love me. You’re so gay, Rogers.”

Bucky pretends it annoys him, because it’s sure to make Steve stop buttering his toast and come over to put his arms around Bucky from behind. Steve doesn’t disappoint.

“The gayest.”

Steve rests his chin on Bucky’s right shoulder, his hands roaming over Bucky’s chest, down into his pants, while Bucky squirms and pretends he’s more interested in pouring cereal than in what Steve’s wonderful hands are doing between his legs. His heart races, his skin shivers and, as always, he tries, successfully for the most part, to quiet the part of his mind that tells him how much better this would have been in that other life-

“Oh God, my eyes! Get a room, you two.”

“This _is_ a room,” Bucky grumbles at Tony, whose entrance has made Steve hastily remove his hands. “Why don’t _you_ get a room?”

“Technically, every room in this compound is mine, Barnes,” Tony smirks at him. “So, you know, you’re welcome for sharing. And all I ask in return is that you engage in your geriatric sexytimes somewhere besides the common kitchen.”

_“There’s nothing to forgive,” Tony had told him firmly when Bucky had tried to apologize the first time they’d met, two months after Insight. “I mean, let he here who **hasn’t** been mind-controlled cast the first stone and all that.”_

_Bucky had been utterly blindsided. And sure, Tony had given him wide berth for several months after that, but that was more than understandable after what Bucky had done- had been made to do- to Howard and Maria._

“Sorry, Tony.”

Steve mumbles, cheeks pink as he resumes fixing his breakfast. Bucky dumps the contents of his bowl back into the cereal box, glad he didn’t get around to adding the milk. He’s not hungry anymore. Well, he _is_ hungry, but not for cereal or any other food. He excuses himself to the room he and Steve share, hoping Steve will get the hint and follow. It’s a gamble, he knows. Steve can be ridiculously oblivious about these things. It’s funny, that even after everything that’s been done to him, it’s Bucky who has to initiate it.

“Real subtle, Barnes!”

Tony calls after him. Well, Steve’s sure to get the hint now. Bucky smiles.

“Fuck off, Stark!”

Tony’s laughter echoes down the hallway. It shouldn’t be laughter Tony sends after him. It should be vengeance. It should be bullets and blows. It should be pain. That, Bucky would understand. This, not so much, but he likes it even if he knows he doesn’t deserve it.

He also doesn’t deserve Steve’s touches. He doesn’t deserve Steve in any capacity, but especially not this gentle, loving reverence Steve bestows on him now. He’d tried to kill Steve, too. Had almost succeeded. Had reduced Steve’s beautiful face to a mess of dripping red and swollen purple-blue. Had continued even when the lines between _Asset_ and _Bucky_ had begun to blur, and had stopped only when the floor of the Helicarrier crumbled beneath them and took Steve away from his violence. Like the fall that had taken Bucky out of his first life.

Bucky knows Steve feels as guilty about that fall as Bucky feels about what the Soldier's done. Even if Steve shouldn’t, even if Bucky doesn’t blame him, not really, but Bucky understands feeling guilty about things that aren’t his fault. He’s in no position to lecture or judge.

He sends out a mental “thank you” to Tony when Steve appears in the doorway to their bedroom less than thirty seconds after Bucky gets there.

“Hey, Buck, not hungry after all?”

Steve’s chest puffs out slightly, his voice a teasing rumble as his lips and eyes quirk upward, and it’s apparent he knows the answer to his question. Bucky leaps across the space between them, pulling Steve inside and closing the door. He kisses Steve desperately, grabbing at Steve’s hands to bring them around his hips. Goosebumps rise on his bare right arm wherever Steve’s skin touches him, neurons and nerve-endings collaborating to tell his metal prosthetic what’s happening on the other side, and he wants more, he needs more.

Steve chuckles into Bucky’s mouth, pulling his own mouth away to catch his breath, much to Bucky’s frustration.

“You’re insatiable, aren’t you?”

Bucky licks his lips, pouting and glaring simultaneously.

“God, Buck,” Steve’s voice and eyes are blown with lust. “God, I love you so fucking much.”

“Show me, then,” Bucky can’t tell if he’s pleading or demanding. _“Show_ me.”

Steve sheds his jogging clothes quickly, still smelling enticingly of musky sweat once he’s naked. Bucky pulls off his T-shirt, sneakers, jeans, and boxers. He sprawls naked on their bed and Steve follows him, rutting himself against Bucky’s thigh and raising more gooseflesh. Bucky closes his eyes, sinking into the bedspread as Steve moves on top of him, Steve’s hard cock pressing against the soft nub of Bucky’s as he peppers Bucky’s face and chest with kisses.

_It was something that had happened so long ago, he can barely remember. Grenade shrapnel blowing up at him, horrible pain between his legs, but the Soldier had finished the mission and limped back to base camp for maintenance. The HYDRA techs had patched him up, cringing at the damage while making jokes in Russian at his expense._

Steve touches him between his legs, and Bucky groans from the sensations on what remains. Maybe it would have been better in the other life, but at the moment he can’t imagine how. His nub slowly hardens; a little over an inch was all that could be saved. Steve’s fingers dance over it, stroking down the long scar where Bucky’s balls used to be, rubbing his perineum just right.

_He hadn’t thought to be ashamed of it, until that first time he took his pants off and saw the look on Steve’s face. Steve had quickly schooled his features, but Bucky had seen the horror, the curiosity, and the fear, before they’d retreated to blank neutrality. Yes, he’d remembered, this **was** something horrifying. This was something the boy he’d been would be ashamed of. This made him different. No, more than different. This made him anathema._

_“Did they- on purpose?” Steve had gulped, grasping unsuccessfully for words. “Why?”_

_“Accident,” Bucky had answered brusquely, shame making him irritable. “My own damn fault, I was sloppy. They did what they could with it.”_

_“No,” Steve had found his words again. “Not your fault. None of this is your fault.”_

_“Whatever you say.”_

_Steve had hugged him fiercely, pressing his naked body against Bucky’s as he’d whispered absolutions and assurances that Bucky hadn’t believed. He hadn’t believed the words, but he’d believed Steve’s body. Steve’s hands touching him, and Steve’s cock hardening against him, and Bucky had thought, yes, this is true, this is right, this is good._

_**If Steve can touch me, can let me touch him, can** want **me to touch him, then maybe- maybe-**_

“Steve,” Bucky pants, groaning and writhing, deep voice rising. “Steve, Stevie, oh!”

Steve kisses his way down Bucky’s body, each press of his lips a benediction on Bucky’s feverish skin. It sings for more, more, more.

_He’d never thought it would be like this, in that other life, but this is real, so already it’s better, better, the best._

“I love you.”

Steve whispers to Bucky’s bellybutton before his mouth closes over the firm nub of Bucky’s cock, enveloping it in wet heat. As he sucks and flicks it with his tongue, saliva spills from between his lips, making its way down the road of scars and thin, dark hair into the crack of Bucky’s ass. The fingers of Steve’s left hand help it along, gently prodding at the entrance of Bucky’s hole.

_In the other life, he’d imagined it with Steve beneath him, taking him, loving it and crying out for more. That’s not entirely possible now, but they’ve done other, similar things. Bucky taking Steve with a strap-on. Bucky poking as much of his nub as he can inside Steve. Those had been nice, and Bucky loves hearing Steve’s moans beneath him, but this way is Bucky’s favorite. The way he can most **feel** it._

_“We’ve both changed,” Steve had told him once, holding him afterward. “Both our bodies have changed.”_

_But Steve’s had changed for the better, even if Bucky occasionally, selfishly, misses the little guy he fell in love with. Steve’s body had changed to make him stronger. Healthier. Where Bucky’s had changed to make him- less._

One of Steve’s fingers breaches him, and Bucky gasps. Steve’s mouth is warm and wet around him as Bucky’s hips heave upward, but Steve’s index finger is too small on its own for Bucky’s liking.

“More,” he knows he’s begging now. “Steve, please, more.”

_A few months into their relationship, and Bucky had felt his lust fading. That had terrified him, more than the exhaustion or his dwindling muscle mass. It had been the only reason he’d finally submitted to a medical exam._

_“I won’t put you under,” Dr. Cho had assured him. “You don’t even need to take off your clothes. All I need to do is take a blood sample, okay?”_

_A blood sample was nothing. He’d successfully steeled himself for her touch, and his body had barely registered the enhanced needle going into the crook of his right arm. His body hadn’t registered it, but his mind had, and it had screamed at him to make it stop. Had told him things that weren’t true, that would never be true again because there was no HYDRA anymore. He’d managed to quiet it, but it had terrified him._

_“You should have security in here or something,” he’d muttered, ominous and ashamed, when she’d finished. “Aren’t you afraid?”_

_**Aren’t you afraid of**_ **me?**

_“No,” Dr. Cho had told him bluntly, her eyes speaking a myriad of dangers faced and conquered. “Should I be?”_

_He hadn’t known._

A second finger stretches Bucky open, but it’s still not enough. His body and mind both scream at him, a rare show of unity, for _more._

Steve’s head rises, mouth leaving Bucky’s skin. A third finger, and it’s almost enough. Bucky groans, long and deep.

“Insatiable,” Steve murmurs with fond desire, fingers twisting to make Bucky writhe. “Goddamn insatiable, Buck.”

“Fuck me, Rogers,” Bucky growls. “Shut up and fuck me!”

Steve chuckles, raising his body off of Bucky’s to sit back slightly, stroking himself with his right hand while he adds a fourth finger inside Bucky. His cock is so big, straining and thick, and Bucky thinks the lust will devour him alive. Not a bad way to go, all things considered.

_After reviewing the results of his blood test, Dr. Cho had given him a gel to rub on his stomach. Once a day for the rest of his life. Blood tests once every three months, to make sure everything’s in working order._

_“There are reconstructive surgeries available, James- ”_

_Dr. Cho had began, but he’d cut her off with a firm rejection. She hadn’t seen, but she had known. But he hadn’t wanted another body-altering surgery. He never wants to wake up **different** again._

_“Drink lots of milk, too,” she’d advised as he’d left the lab. “You have a high risk of osteoporosis.”_

_He hadn’t understood why the mention of milk had scared him. Vague recollections aside he still doesn’t, but he drinks at least three glasses a day to keep his bones healthy._

“I love you.”

Steve pulls his fingers out of Bucky. He expertly rolls on a condom, slicking himself up with KY.

“Show me.”

He needs to be filled again. He needs to be filled with Steve.

_Show me._

Steve slides inside him, bringing himself flush with Bucky’s supine body. Bucky groans, everything he wants pressed against him and inside him. Steve’s touch is electrifying, and Bucky closes his eyes to drown out everything but the sensation and sound of Steve.

“I love you,” Steve babbles with every thrust. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Bucky’s arms encircle Steve’s back, goosebumps and mechanical vibrations humming against Steve’s skin. Before he kisses Steve, before he sucks down the adoration Steve is chanting to him, Bucky chants back.

“I love you, too, Stevie.”

He feels Steve’s response as their lips press together. Steve’s body vibrates as much as Bucky’s left arm, and Bucky feels Steve’s cock throbbing with release inside him. He tightens himself around Steve to make it as good as he can, even as his own climax takes him, his nub spilling clear, thin fluid against Steve’s firm belly. They moan into each other’s mouths, Steve’s shaking body going slack in Bucky’s arms, his head pulling from Bucky’s to rest on Bucky’s chest, and Bucky revels in the feel of it on his skin as he opens his eyes and kisses the top of Steve’s head.

“I love you, too.”

Bucky doesn’t say it as often as Steve. Most days he’s not even sure he’s capable of love anymore, but in this moment he believes that he is. He loves Steve. He’s loved him since the day he met him, and despite everything that should have torn them apart several lifetimes over, here they are.

Steve sighs with satisfaction and slips out of Bucky. They lie there for a long time, holding each other. Basking in each other’s glow.

 _How could this have been better?_ Bucky challenges the treacherous thoughts as they creep around the corners of his mind. _How?_

He has no answer for himself, and he’s content.


End file.
